Showing posts with label isolation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label isolation. Show all posts
Friday, 17 December 2021
Thursday, 10 March 2016
Barack Obama says Saudi Arabia needs to learn to share region with Iran
Mark Landler in The Times of India
President Barack Obama believes that Saudi Arabia, one of America's most important allies in the Middle East, needs to learn how to "share" the region with its arch enemy, Iran, and that both countries are guilty of fuelling proxy wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
In a series of interviews with the magazine Atlantic published on Thursday, Obama said a number of US allies in the Persian Gulf — as well as in Europe — were "free riders," eager to drag the United States into grinding sectarian conflicts that sometimes had little to do with US interests. He showed little sympathy for the Saudis, who have been threatened by the nuclear deal Obama reached with Iran.
The Saudis, Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine's national correspondent, "need to find an effective way to share the neighbourhood and institute some sort of cold peace". Reflexively backing them against Iran, the president said, "would mean that we have to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. And that would be in the interest neither of the United States nor of the Middle East."
Obama's frustration with much of the Arab world is not new, but rarely has he been so blunt about it. He placed his comments in the context of his broader struggle to extract the United States from the bloody morass of the Middle East so that the nation can focus on more promising, faster-growing parts of the world, like Asia and Latin America.
"If we're not talking to them," he said, referring to young people in those places, "because the only thing we're doing is figuring out how to destroy or cordon off or control the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity, then we're missing the boat."
Obama also said his support of the Nato military intervention in Libya had been a "mistake," driven in part by his erroneous belief that Britain and France would bear more of the burden of the operation. He defended his refusal not to enforce his own red line against Syria's president, Bashar Assad, even though Vice-President Joe Biden argued internally, the magazine reported, that "big nations don't bluff."
The president disputed criticism that he should have done more to resist the aggression of President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Ukraine. As a neighbour of Russia, Obama said, Ukraine was always going to matter more to Putin than to the United States. This meant that in any military confrontation between Moscow and the West, Russia was going to maintain "escalatory dominance" over its former satellite state.
"The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-Nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do," he said. "This is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for."
Obama, who has spoken regularly to Goldberg about Israel and Iran, granted him extraordinary access. The portrait that emerges from the interviews is of a president openly contemptuous of Washington's foreign-policy establishment, which he said was obsessed with preserving presidential credibility, even at the cost of blundering into ill-advised military adventures.
"There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow," Obama said. "And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses." This consensus, the president continued, can lead to bad decisions. "In the midst of an international challenge like Syria," he said, "you are judged harshly if you don't follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons."
Although Obama's tone was introspective, he engaged in little second-guessing. He dismissed the argument that his failure to enforce the red line in Syria, or his broader reticence about using military force, had emboldened Russia. Putin, he noted, invaded Georgia in 2008 during the presidency of George W Bush, even though the United States had more than 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq.
Similarly, the president pushed back on the suggestion that he had not been firm enough in challenging China's aggression in the South China Sea, where it is building military installations on reefs and islands, some of which are claimed by the Philippines and other neighbours.
"I've been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China," Obama said.
The president refused to box himself in as a foreign-policy thinker.
"I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can't, at any given moment, relieve all the world's misery," he said.
But he went on to describe himself as an internationalist and an idealist. Above all, Obama appeared weary of the constant demands and expectations placed on the United States.
"Free riders aggravate me," he said.
He put France and Britain in that category, at least as far as the Libya operation was concerned. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, he said, became distracted by other issues, while President Nicolas Sarkozy of France "wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defences."
Only on the threat posed by the Islamic State did Obama express some misgivings. He likened the extremist group to the Joker in "The Dark Knight," the 2008 Batman movie. The Middle East, Obama said, was like Gotham, a corrupt metropolis controlled by a cartel of thugs.
"Then the Joker comes in and lights the whole city on fire," Obama said. "ISIL is the Joker," he added, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Still, Obama acknowledged that immediately after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, he did not adequately reassure Americans that he understood the threat, and was confronting it.
"Every president has his strengths and weaknesses," he said. "And there is no doubt that there are times where I have not been attentive enough to feelings and emotions and politics in communicating what we're doing and how we're doing it."
President Barack Obama believes that Saudi Arabia, one of America's most important allies in the Middle East, needs to learn how to "share" the region with its arch enemy, Iran, and that both countries are guilty of fuelling proxy wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
In a series of interviews with the magazine Atlantic published on Thursday, Obama said a number of US allies in the Persian Gulf — as well as in Europe — were "free riders," eager to drag the United States into grinding sectarian conflicts that sometimes had little to do with US interests. He showed little sympathy for the Saudis, who have been threatened by the nuclear deal Obama reached with Iran.
The Saudis, Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine's national correspondent, "need to find an effective way to share the neighbourhood and institute some sort of cold peace". Reflexively backing them against Iran, the president said, "would mean that we have to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. And that would be in the interest neither of the United States nor of the Middle East."
Obama's frustration with much of the Arab world is not new, but rarely has he been so blunt about it. He placed his comments in the context of his broader struggle to extract the United States from the bloody morass of the Middle East so that the nation can focus on more promising, faster-growing parts of the world, like Asia and Latin America.
"If we're not talking to them," he said, referring to young people in those places, "because the only thing we're doing is figuring out how to destroy or cordon off or control the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity, then we're missing the boat."
Obama also said his support of the Nato military intervention in Libya had been a "mistake," driven in part by his erroneous belief that Britain and France would bear more of the burden of the operation. He defended his refusal not to enforce his own red line against Syria's president, Bashar Assad, even though Vice-President Joe Biden argued internally, the magazine reported, that "big nations don't bluff."
The president disputed criticism that he should have done more to resist the aggression of President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Ukraine. As a neighbour of Russia, Obama said, Ukraine was always going to matter more to Putin than to the United States. This meant that in any military confrontation between Moscow and the West, Russia was going to maintain "escalatory dominance" over its former satellite state.
"The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-Nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do," he said. "This is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for."
Obama, who has spoken regularly to Goldberg about Israel and Iran, granted him extraordinary access. The portrait that emerges from the interviews is of a president openly contemptuous of Washington's foreign-policy establishment, which he said was obsessed with preserving presidential credibility, even at the cost of blundering into ill-advised military adventures.
"There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow," Obama said. "And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses." This consensus, the president continued, can lead to bad decisions. "In the midst of an international challenge like Syria," he said, "you are judged harshly if you don't follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons."
Although Obama's tone was introspective, he engaged in little second-guessing. He dismissed the argument that his failure to enforce the red line in Syria, or his broader reticence about using military force, had emboldened Russia. Putin, he noted, invaded Georgia in 2008 during the presidency of George W Bush, even though the United States had more than 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq.
Similarly, the president pushed back on the suggestion that he had not been firm enough in challenging China's aggression in the South China Sea, where it is building military installations on reefs and islands, some of which are claimed by the Philippines and other neighbours.
"I've been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China," Obama said.
The president refused to box himself in as a foreign-policy thinker.
"I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can't, at any given moment, relieve all the world's misery," he said.
But he went on to describe himself as an internationalist and an idealist. Above all, Obama appeared weary of the constant demands and expectations placed on the United States.
"Free riders aggravate me," he said.
He put France and Britain in that category, at least as far as the Libya operation was concerned. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, he said, became distracted by other issues, while President Nicolas Sarkozy of France "wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defences."
Only on the threat posed by the Islamic State did Obama express some misgivings. He likened the extremist group to the Joker in "The Dark Knight," the 2008 Batman movie. The Middle East, Obama said, was like Gotham, a corrupt metropolis controlled by a cartel of thugs.
"Then the Joker comes in and lights the whole city on fire," Obama said. "ISIL is the Joker," he added, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Still, Obama acknowledged that immediately after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, he did not adequately reassure Americans that he understood the threat, and was confronting it.
"Every president has his strengths and weaknesses," he said. "And there is no doubt that there are times where I have not been attentive enough to feelings and emotions and politics in communicating what we're doing and how we're doing it."
Thursday, 2 April 2015
The Future of Loneliness
Olivia Laing in The Guardian
At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame.
As with the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives.
But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd.
In 1942, the American painter Edward Hopper produced the signature image of urban loneliness. Nighthawks shows four people in a diner at night, cut off from the street outside by a curving glass window: a disquieting scene of disconnection and estrangement. In his art, Hopper was centrally concerned with how humans were handling the environment of the electric city: the way it crowded people together while enclosing them in increasingly small and exposing cells. His paintings establish an architecture of loneliness, reproducing the confining units of office blocks and studio apartments, in which unwitting exhibitionists reveal their private lives in cinematic stills, framed by panes of glass.
More than 70 years have passed since Nighthawks was painted, but its anxieties about connection have lost none of their relevance, though unease about the physical city has been superseded by fears over our new virtual public space, the internet. In the intervening years, we have entered into a world of screens that extends far beyond Hopper’s unsettled vision.
Loneliness centres on the act of being seen. When a person is lonely, they long to be witnessed, accepted, desired, at the same time as becoming intensely wary of exposure. According to research carried out over the past decade at the University of Chicago, the feeling of loneliness triggers what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat. In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, the individual becomes hyperalert to rejection, growing increasingly inclined to perceive social interactions as tinged with hostility or scorn. The result is a vicious circle of withdrawal, in which the lonely person becomes increasingly suspicious, intensifying their sense of isolation.
This is where online engagement seems to exercise its special charm. Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection. The screen acts as a kind of protective membrane, a scrim that allows invisibility and transformation. You can filter your image, concealing unattractive elements, and you can emerge enhanced: an online avatar designed to attract likes. But now a problem arises, for the contact this produces is not the same thing as intimacy. Curating a perfected self might win followers or Facebook friends, but it will not necessarily cure loneliness, since the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person – ugly, unhappy and awkward, as well as radiant and selfie-ready.
This aspect of digital existence is among the concerns of Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been writing about human-technology interactions for the past three decades. She has become increasingly wary of the capacity of online spaces to fulfil us in the ways we seem to want them to. According to Turkle, part of the problem with the internet is that it encourages self-invention. “At the screen,” she writes in Alone Together (2011), “you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. It’s a seductive but dangerous habit of mind.”
But there are other dangers. My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation. It was the autumn of 2011, and I was living in New York, recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and friends. In many ways, the internet made me feel safe. I liked the contact I got from it: the conversations, the jokes, the accumulation of positive regard, the favouriting on Twitter and the Facebook likes, the little devices designed for boosting egos. Most of the time, it seemed that the exchange, the gifting back and forth of information and attention, was working well, especially on Twitter, with its knack for prompting conversation between strangers. It felt like a community, a joyful place; a lifeline, in fact, considering how cut off I otherwise was. But as the years went by – 1,000 tweets, 2,000 tweets, 17,400 tweets – I had the growing sense that the rules were changing, that it was becoming harder to achieve real connection, though as a source of information it remained unparalleled.
This period coincided with what felt like a profound shift in internet mores. In the past few years, two things have happened: a dramatic rise in online hostility, and a growing awareness that the lovely sense of privacy engendered by communicating via a computer is a catastrophic illusion. The pressure to appear perfect is greater than ever, while the once‑protective screen no longer reliably separates the domains of the real and the virtual. Increasingly, participants in online spaces have become aware that the unknown audience might at any moment turn on them in a frenzy of shaming and scapegoating.
The atmosphere of surveillance and punishment destroys intimacy by making it unsafe to reveal mistakes and imperfections. My own sense of ease on Twitter diminished rapidly when people began posting photos of strangers they had snapped on public transport, sleeping with their mouths open. Knowing that the internet was becoming a site of shaming eroded the feeling of safety that had once made it seem such a haven for the lonely.
The dissolution of the barrier between the public and the private, the sense of being surveilled and judged, extends far beyond human observers. We are also being watched by the very devices on which we make our broadcasts. As the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen recently said in the art magazine Frieze: “We are at the point (actually, probably long past) where the majority of the world’s images are made by machines for machines.” In this environment of enforced transparency, the equivalent of the Nighthawks diner, almost everything we do, from shopping in a supermarket to posting a photograph on Facebook, is mapped, and the gathered data used to predict, monetise, encourage or inhibit our future actions.
This growing entanglement of the corporate and social, this creeping sense of being tracked by invisible eyes, demands an increasing sophistication about what is said and where. The possibility of virulent judgment and rejection induces precisely the kind of hypervigilance and withdrawal that increases loneliness. With this has come the slowly dawning realisation that our digital traces will long outlive us.
Back in 1999, the critic Bruce Benderson published a landmark essay, Sex and Isolation, in which he observed: “We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark. Today’s texts and images may look like real carvings – but in the end they are erasable, only a temporary blockage of all-invasive light. No matter how long the words and pictures stay on our screens, there will be no encrustation; all will be reversible.”
Benderson thought the transience of the internet was the reason that it felt so lonely, but to me it is far more alarming to think that everything we do there is permanent. At that time – two years before 9/11, and 14 years before Edward Snowden exposed the intrusive surveillance it had set in motion – it was no doubt impossible to imagine the grim permanence of the web to come, where data has consequences and nothing is ever lost – not arrest logs, not embarrassing photos, not Google searches of child porn or embarrassing illnesses, not the torture records of entire nations.
Faced with the knowledge that nothing we say, no matter how trivial or silly, will ever be completely erased, we find it hard to take the risks that togetherness entails. But perhaps, as lonely people often are, I am being too negative, too paranoid. Perhaps we are capable of adapting, of finding intimacy in this landscape of unprecedented exposure. What I want to know is where we are headed. What is this sense of perpetual scrutiny doing to our ability to connect?
* * *
The future does not come from nowhere. Every new technology generates a surge of anxious energy. Each one changes the rules of communication and rearranges the social order. Take the telephone, that miraculous device for dissolving distance. From the moment in April 1877 that the first line linked phones No 1 and No 2 in the Bell Telephone Company, it was perceived as an almost uncanny instrument, separating the voice from the body.
The phone swiftly came to be regarded as a lifeline, an antidote to loneliness, particularly for rural women who were stuck in farmhouses miles from family and friends. But fears about anonymity clung to the device. By opening a channel between the outside world and the domestic sphere, the telephone facilitated bad behaviour. From the very beginning, obscene callers targeted both strangers and the “hello girls” who worked the switchboards. People worried that germs might be transmitted down the lines, carried on human breath. They also worried about who might be lurking, invisibly eavesdropping on private conversations. The germs were a fantasy, but the listeners were real enough, be they operators or neighbours on shared telephone lines.
Anxiety also collected around the possibility for misunderstanding. In 1930, Jean Cocteau wrote his haunting monologue The Human Voice, a play intimately concerned with the black holes that technologically mediated failures of communication produce. It consists of nothing more than a woman speaking on a bad party line – as these shared services were known – to the lover who has jilted her and who is imminently to marry another woman. Her terrible grief is exacerbated by the constant danger of being drowned out by other voices, or disconnected. “But I am speaking loud … Can you hear me? … Oh, I can hear you now. Yes, it was terrible, it was like being dead. You’re here and you can’t make yourself heard.” The final shot of the television film of the play, starring Ingrid Bergman, leaves no doubt as to the culprit, lingering grimly on the shining black handset, still emitting the dead end of a dial tone as the credits roll.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Gail Albert-Halaban courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery
The broken, bitty dialogue of The Human Voice underscores the way that a device designed for talking might in fact make talking more difficult. If the telephone is a machine for sharing words, then the internet is a machine for constructing and sharing identities. In the internet era, Cocteau’s anxieties about how technology has affected our ability to speak intimately to one another accelerate into terror about whether the boundaries between people have been destroyed altogether.
I-Be Area, a chaotic, vibrant and alarming film made in 2007, turns on these questions of identity and its dissolution. Its central character is engaged in a war with his clone, and his clone’s online avatar. Making lavish use of jump cuts, face paint and cheap digital effects, the film captures the manic possibilities and perils of digital existence. All the cast, starting with the children in the first frame making hyper-cute adoption videos for themselves, are in search of a desirable persona. They perform for an audience that may at any moment dissolve or turn aggressive, which stimulates them into increasingly creative and bizarre transformations. Often seemingly imprisoned in teenage bedrooms, everyone is talking all the time: a tidal wave of rapid, high-pitched, Valley Girl inflections, the spiel of YouTube bedroom celebrities mashed with corporate catchphrases and the broken English of bots and programming lingo. Everyone is promoting, no one is listening.
The creator of this visionary and hilarious film is Ryan Trecartin, a baby-faced 34-year-old described by the New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s”. Trecartin’s movies are made with a band of friends. They possess a campy DIY aesthetic that often recalls the avant garde genius of the 1960s film-maker Jack Smith, the character morphing of Cindy Sherman, the physical mayhem of Jackass and the idiotic confessional candour of reality TV.
These films take the experiences of contemporary digital culture – the sickening, thrilling feeling of being overwhelmed by a surge of possibilities, not least who you could become – and speed them up. Trecartin’s work is ecstatically enjoyable to watch, though as the critic Maggie Nelson wryly observes: “Viewers who look to Trecartin as the idiot savant emissary from the next generation who has come to answer the question ‘Are we going to be alright?’ are not likely to feel reassured.”
Watching the precisely crafted chaos, one has the disquieting sensation that it is one’s own life that is under the lens. Trecartin’s characters (though I doubt he would sanction such a term, with its vanished, 20th-century confidence in a solid knowable self) understand that they can be owned or branded, discarded or redesigned. In response to pressure, their identities warp and melt.
What is exciting about Trecartin’s work is the ecstasy generated by these transformations. It is tempting to suggest that this might even be a futuristic solution to loneliness: dissolving identity, erasing the burdensome, boundaried individual altogether. But there remain lingering currents of unease, not least around the question of who is watching.
* *
FacebookTwitterPinterest Frank Benson’s sculpture Juliana, 2015. Photograph: Benoit Pailley
But Surround Audience also includes work that testifies to the internet’s ability to dissolve isolation, to create community and closeness. Juliana, Frank Benson’s extraordinary sculpture of the 26-year-old artist and DJ Juliana Huxtable, is a triumphant icon of self-creation. Huxtable is transgender, and the sculpture, a life-size 3D print, displays her naked body, with both breasts and penis, those supposedly defining characteristics of gender. She reclines on a plinth, braids spilling down her back, her extended right hand fixed in a gesture of elegant command: a queenly figure, her shimmering skin spray-painted an unearthly metallic blue-green. Juliana shows how the trans community is redefining authenticity. It is not a coincidence that the trans rights movement has surged in an era in which both identity creation and community building are facilitated by technology. Turkle’s talk of the danger of self-creation misses the importance, especially for people whose sexuality, gender or race is considered marginal, of being able to construct and manifest an identity that is often off-limits or forbidden in the physical world.
* * *
The future does not announce its arrival. In Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, published in 2010, there is a scene set in the near future that involves a business meeting between a young woman and an older man. After talking for a while, the girl becomes agitated by the demands of speech and asks the man if she can “T” (text) him instead, though they are sitting side by side. As information silently flushes between their two handsets, she looks “almost sleepy with relief”, describing the exchange as pure. Reading it, I can distinctly remember thinking that it was appalling, shocking, wonderfully far-fetched. Within a matter of months it seemed instead merely plausible, a little gauche, but entirely understandable as an urge. Now it is just what we do: texting in company, emailing colleagues at the same desk, avoiding encounters, DMing instead.
While I was in New York, I met with Trecartin to discuss Surround Audience and what it has to say about the future we have fallen into. He was clutching a coffee and dressed in a red hoodie emblazoned with the word HUNT, a leftover prop from a shoot. He spoke much more slowly than the logorrheic characters he plays in films, pausing frequently to locate the exact word. He, too, felt that, with the acceleration in the past few years, we have entered almost unknowingly into a new era, long heralded and abruptly arrived. “We don’t necessarily look different yet, but we’re very different,” he said.
This space, the future now, is characterised, he believes, by a blurring between individuals and networks. “Your existence is shared and maintained and you don’t have control over all of it.”
But Trecartin feels broadly positive about where our embrace of technology might take us. “It’s obvious,” he said, “that none of this stuff can be controlled, so all we can do is steer and help encourage compassionate usage and hope things accumulate in ways that are good for people and not awful … Maybe I’m being naive about this, but all of these things feel natural. It’s like the way we already work. We’re making things that are already in us.”
The key word here is compassion, but I was also struck by his use of the word natural. Critiques of the technological society often seem possessed by a fear that what is happening is profoundly unnatural, that we are becoming post-human, entering what Turkle has called “the robotic moment”. But Surround Audience felt deeply human; an intensely life-affirming combination of curiosity, hopefulness and fear, full of richly creative strategies for engagement and subversion.
Over the week, I kept being drawn back by one piece in particular, an untitled six-minute film by the Austrian artist Oliver Laric, whose work is often about the tension between copies and originals. Laric has redrawn and animated scenes of physical transformation from dozens of cartoons, anchored by an odd, unsettlingly melancholy loop of music. Nothing stays constant. Forms continually migrate, a panther turning into a beautiful girl, Pinocchio into a donkey, an old woman deliquescing into mud. The people’s expressions are striking, as their bodies melt and reform, a heartrending mixture of alarm and resignation. The film captures our anxieties about image: Am I desirable? Do I need to be tweaked or improved? This sense of being out of control, subject to external and sinister forces, is part of what it has always meant to be human, to be trapped in temporal existence, with the inevitable upheavals and losses that entails. What could be more sci-fi, after all, than the everyday horror show of ageing, sickness, death?
Somehow, the vulnerability expressed by Laric’s film gave me a sense of hope. Talking to Trecartin, who is only three years younger than me, had felt like encountering someone from a different generation. My own understanding of loneliness relied on a belief in solid, separate selves that he saw as hopelessly outmoded. In his worldview, everyone was perpetually slipping into each other, passing through ceaseless cycles of transformation; no longer separate, but interspersed. Perhaps he was right. We aren’t as solid as we once thought. We are embodied but we are also networks, living on inside machines and in other people’s heads; memories and data streams. We are being watched and we do not have control. We long for contact and it makes us afraid. But as long as we are still capable of feeling and expressing vulnerability, intimacy stands a chance.
At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame.
As with the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives.
But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd.
In 1942, the American painter Edward Hopper produced the signature image of urban loneliness. Nighthawks shows four people in a diner at night, cut off from the street outside by a curving glass window: a disquieting scene of disconnection and estrangement. In his art, Hopper was centrally concerned with how humans were handling the environment of the electric city: the way it crowded people together while enclosing them in increasingly small and exposing cells. His paintings establish an architecture of loneliness, reproducing the confining units of office blocks and studio apartments, in which unwitting exhibitionists reveal their private lives in cinematic stills, framed by panes of glass.
More than 70 years have passed since Nighthawks was painted, but its anxieties about connection have lost none of their relevance, though unease about the physical city has been superseded by fears over our new virtual public space, the internet. In the intervening years, we have entered into a world of screens that extends far beyond Hopper’s unsettled vision.
Loneliness centres on the act of being seen. When a person is lonely, they long to be witnessed, accepted, desired, at the same time as becoming intensely wary of exposure. According to research carried out over the past decade at the University of Chicago, the feeling of loneliness triggers what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat. In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, the individual becomes hyperalert to rejection, growing increasingly inclined to perceive social interactions as tinged with hostility or scorn. The result is a vicious circle of withdrawal, in which the lonely person becomes increasingly suspicious, intensifying their sense of isolation.
This is where online engagement seems to exercise its special charm. Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection. The screen acts as a kind of protective membrane, a scrim that allows invisibility and transformation. You can filter your image, concealing unattractive elements, and you can emerge enhanced: an online avatar designed to attract likes. But now a problem arises, for the contact this produces is not the same thing as intimacy. Curating a perfected self might win followers or Facebook friends, but it will not necessarily cure loneliness, since the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person – ugly, unhappy and awkward, as well as radiant and selfie-ready.
This aspect of digital existence is among the concerns of Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been writing about human-technology interactions for the past three decades. She has become increasingly wary of the capacity of online spaces to fulfil us in the ways we seem to want them to. According to Turkle, part of the problem with the internet is that it encourages self-invention. “At the screen,” she writes in Alone Together (2011), “you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. It’s a seductive but dangerous habit of mind.”
But there are other dangers. My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation. It was the autumn of 2011, and I was living in New York, recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and friends. In many ways, the internet made me feel safe. I liked the contact I got from it: the conversations, the jokes, the accumulation of positive regard, the favouriting on Twitter and the Facebook likes, the little devices designed for boosting egos. Most of the time, it seemed that the exchange, the gifting back and forth of information and attention, was working well, especially on Twitter, with its knack for prompting conversation between strangers. It felt like a community, a joyful place; a lifeline, in fact, considering how cut off I otherwise was. But as the years went by – 1,000 tweets, 2,000 tweets, 17,400 tweets – I had the growing sense that the rules were changing, that it was becoming harder to achieve real connection, though as a source of information it remained unparalleled.
This period coincided with what felt like a profound shift in internet mores. In the past few years, two things have happened: a dramatic rise in online hostility, and a growing awareness that the lovely sense of privacy engendered by communicating via a computer is a catastrophic illusion. The pressure to appear perfect is greater than ever, while the once‑protective screen no longer reliably separates the domains of the real and the virtual. Increasingly, participants in online spaces have become aware that the unknown audience might at any moment turn on them in a frenzy of shaming and scapegoating.
The atmosphere of surveillance and punishment destroys intimacy by making it unsafe to reveal mistakes and imperfections. My own sense of ease on Twitter diminished rapidly when people began posting photos of strangers they had snapped on public transport, sleeping with their mouths open. Knowing that the internet was becoming a site of shaming eroded the feeling of safety that had once made it seem such a haven for the lonely.
The dissolution of the barrier between the public and the private, the sense of being surveilled and judged, extends far beyond human observers. We are also being watched by the very devices on which we make our broadcasts. As the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen recently said in the art magazine Frieze: “We are at the point (actually, probably long past) where the majority of the world’s images are made by machines for machines.” In this environment of enforced transparency, the equivalent of the Nighthawks diner, almost everything we do, from shopping in a supermarket to posting a photograph on Facebook, is mapped, and the gathered data used to predict, monetise, encourage or inhibit our future actions.
This growing entanglement of the corporate and social, this creeping sense of being tracked by invisible eyes, demands an increasing sophistication about what is said and where. The possibility of virulent judgment and rejection induces precisely the kind of hypervigilance and withdrawal that increases loneliness. With this has come the slowly dawning realisation that our digital traces will long outlive us.
Back in 1999, the critic Bruce Benderson published a landmark essay, Sex and Isolation, in which he observed: “We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark. Today’s texts and images may look like real carvings – but in the end they are erasable, only a temporary blockage of all-invasive light. No matter how long the words and pictures stay on our screens, there will be no encrustation; all will be reversible.”
Benderson thought the transience of the internet was the reason that it felt so lonely, but to me it is far more alarming to think that everything we do there is permanent. At that time – two years before 9/11, and 14 years before Edward Snowden exposed the intrusive surveillance it had set in motion – it was no doubt impossible to imagine the grim permanence of the web to come, where data has consequences and nothing is ever lost – not arrest logs, not embarrassing photos, not Google searches of child porn or embarrassing illnesses, not the torture records of entire nations.
Faced with the knowledge that nothing we say, no matter how trivial or silly, will ever be completely erased, we find it hard to take the risks that togetherness entails. But perhaps, as lonely people often are, I am being too negative, too paranoid. Perhaps we are capable of adapting, of finding intimacy in this landscape of unprecedented exposure. What I want to know is where we are headed. What is this sense of perpetual scrutiny doing to our ability to connect?
* * *
The future does not come from nowhere. Every new technology generates a surge of anxious energy. Each one changes the rules of communication and rearranges the social order. Take the telephone, that miraculous device for dissolving distance. From the moment in April 1877 that the first line linked phones No 1 and No 2 in the Bell Telephone Company, it was perceived as an almost uncanny instrument, separating the voice from the body.
The phone swiftly came to be regarded as a lifeline, an antidote to loneliness, particularly for rural women who were stuck in farmhouses miles from family and friends. But fears about anonymity clung to the device. By opening a channel between the outside world and the domestic sphere, the telephone facilitated bad behaviour. From the very beginning, obscene callers targeted both strangers and the “hello girls” who worked the switchboards. People worried that germs might be transmitted down the lines, carried on human breath. They also worried about who might be lurking, invisibly eavesdropping on private conversations. The germs were a fantasy, but the listeners were real enough, be they operators or neighbours on shared telephone lines.
Anxiety also collected around the possibility for misunderstanding. In 1930, Jean Cocteau wrote his haunting monologue The Human Voice, a play intimately concerned with the black holes that technologically mediated failures of communication produce. It consists of nothing more than a woman speaking on a bad party line – as these shared services were known – to the lover who has jilted her and who is imminently to marry another woman. Her terrible grief is exacerbated by the constant danger of being drowned out by other voices, or disconnected. “But I am speaking loud … Can you hear me? … Oh, I can hear you now. Yes, it was terrible, it was like being dead. You’re here and you can’t make yourself heard.” The final shot of the television film of the play, starring Ingrid Bergman, leaves no doubt as to the culprit, lingering grimly on the shining black handset, still emitting the dead end of a dial tone as the credits roll.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Gail Albert-Halaban courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery
The broken, bitty dialogue of The Human Voice underscores the way that a device designed for talking might in fact make talking more difficult. If the telephone is a machine for sharing words, then the internet is a machine for constructing and sharing identities. In the internet era, Cocteau’s anxieties about how technology has affected our ability to speak intimately to one another accelerate into terror about whether the boundaries between people have been destroyed altogether.
I-Be Area, a chaotic, vibrant and alarming film made in 2007, turns on these questions of identity and its dissolution. Its central character is engaged in a war with his clone, and his clone’s online avatar. Making lavish use of jump cuts, face paint and cheap digital effects, the film captures the manic possibilities and perils of digital existence. All the cast, starting with the children in the first frame making hyper-cute adoption videos for themselves, are in search of a desirable persona. They perform for an audience that may at any moment dissolve or turn aggressive, which stimulates them into increasingly creative and bizarre transformations. Often seemingly imprisoned in teenage bedrooms, everyone is talking all the time: a tidal wave of rapid, high-pitched, Valley Girl inflections, the spiel of YouTube bedroom celebrities mashed with corporate catchphrases and the broken English of bots and programming lingo. Everyone is promoting, no one is listening.
The creator of this visionary and hilarious film is Ryan Trecartin, a baby-faced 34-year-old described by the New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s”. Trecartin’s movies are made with a band of friends. They possess a campy DIY aesthetic that often recalls the avant garde genius of the 1960s film-maker Jack Smith, the character morphing of Cindy Sherman, the physical mayhem of Jackass and the idiotic confessional candour of reality TV.
These films take the experiences of contemporary digital culture – the sickening, thrilling feeling of being overwhelmed by a surge of possibilities, not least who you could become – and speed them up. Trecartin’s work is ecstatically enjoyable to watch, though as the critic Maggie Nelson wryly observes: “Viewers who look to Trecartin as the idiot savant emissary from the next generation who has come to answer the question ‘Are we going to be alright?’ are not likely to feel reassured.”
Watching the precisely crafted chaos, one has the disquieting sensation that it is one’s own life that is under the lens. Trecartin’s characters (though I doubt he would sanction such a term, with its vanished, 20th-century confidence in a solid knowable self) understand that they can be owned or branded, discarded or redesigned. In response to pressure, their identities warp and melt.
What is exciting about Trecartin’s work is the ecstasy generated by these transformations. It is tempting to suggest that this might even be a futuristic solution to loneliness: dissolving identity, erasing the burdensome, boundaried individual altogether. But there remain lingering currents of unease, not least around the question of who is watching.
* *
*
FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Gail Albert-Halaban courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery
For the past two years, Trecartin has been working with the curator Lauren Cornell to put together the 2015 Triennial at New York’s New Museum, which opened at the end of February. This event brings together 51 participants whose work reflects on internet existence. The title, Surround Audience, expresses the sinister as well as blissful possibilities for contact that have opened up. Artist as witness, or maybe artist imprisoned in an experiment none of us can escape.
Over the course of a freezing week in New York in February, I went to see Surround Audience four times, wanting to understand how contemporary artists were grappling with loneliness and intimacy. The most confrontationally dystopic piece was Josh Kline’s terrifying Freedom, an installation re-creating the architecture of Zuccotti Park, the privately owned public space in Manhattan that Occupy Wall Street took over. Kline had populated his replica with five human-size Teletubbies dressed in the uniforms of riot police, with thigh holsters, nine-hole boots and bulletproof vests. In their bellies were televisions playing footage of off-duty cops flatly read aloud from the social media feeds of activists. Kline’s work makes tangible the growing complication of the spaces we inhabit, and the easy misappropriation of our words. As I sat listening to the feed I watched a beaming young woman with a baby take repeated selfies with one of the helmeted figures.
What is it like to be watched like this? Many of the pieces suggest that it feels like being in prison – or perhaps in the horrifying quarantine bunkers designed by the Hong Kong artist Nadim Abbas. These tiny cells, no larger than a single bed, have been furnished, Apartment Therapy-style, with potted plants, striped throws and abstract prints, an atmosphere of modish domesticity at odds with the implicit violence of the space. As in Hopper’s Nighthawks diner, there is no way in or out; simply a pane of glass that facilitates voyeurism while making contact impossible. Touch can only be achieved by way of two sets of black rubber gauntlets, one pair permitting someone – a guard, maybe, or a nurse or warden – to reach in and the other allowing the incumbent to reach out. It’s hard to think of a lonelier space.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Photograph: Gail Albert-Halaban courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery
For the past two years, Trecartin has been working with the curator Lauren Cornell to put together the 2015 Triennial at New York’s New Museum, which opened at the end of February. This event brings together 51 participants whose work reflects on internet existence. The title, Surround Audience, expresses the sinister as well as blissful possibilities for contact that have opened up. Artist as witness, or maybe artist imprisoned in an experiment none of us can escape.
Over the course of a freezing week in New York in February, I went to see Surround Audience four times, wanting to understand how contemporary artists were grappling with loneliness and intimacy. The most confrontationally dystopic piece was Josh Kline’s terrifying Freedom, an installation re-creating the architecture of Zuccotti Park, the privately owned public space in Manhattan that Occupy Wall Street took over. Kline had populated his replica with five human-size Teletubbies dressed in the uniforms of riot police, with thigh holsters, nine-hole boots and bulletproof vests. In their bellies were televisions playing footage of off-duty cops flatly read aloud from the social media feeds of activists. Kline’s work makes tangible the growing complication of the spaces we inhabit, and the easy misappropriation of our words. As I sat listening to the feed I watched a beaming young woman with a baby take repeated selfies with one of the helmeted figures.
What is it like to be watched like this? Many of the pieces suggest that it feels like being in prison – or perhaps in the horrifying quarantine bunkers designed by the Hong Kong artist Nadim Abbas. These tiny cells, no larger than a single bed, have been furnished, Apartment Therapy-style, with potted plants, striped throws and abstract prints, an atmosphere of modish domesticity at odds with the implicit violence of the space. As in Hopper’s Nighthawks diner, there is no way in or out; simply a pane of glass that facilitates voyeurism while making contact impossible. Touch can only be achieved by way of two sets of black rubber gauntlets, one pair permitting someone – a guard, maybe, or a nurse or warden – to reach in and the other allowing the incumbent to reach out. It’s hard to think of a lonelier space.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Frank Benson’s sculpture Juliana, 2015. Photograph: Benoit Pailley
But Surround Audience also includes work that testifies to the internet’s ability to dissolve isolation, to create community and closeness. Juliana, Frank Benson’s extraordinary sculpture of the 26-year-old artist and DJ Juliana Huxtable, is a triumphant icon of self-creation. Huxtable is transgender, and the sculpture, a life-size 3D print, displays her naked body, with both breasts and penis, those supposedly defining characteristics of gender. She reclines on a plinth, braids spilling down her back, her extended right hand fixed in a gesture of elegant command: a queenly figure, her shimmering skin spray-painted an unearthly metallic blue-green. Juliana shows how the trans community is redefining authenticity. It is not a coincidence that the trans rights movement has surged in an era in which both identity creation and community building are facilitated by technology. Turkle’s talk of the danger of self-creation misses the importance, especially for people whose sexuality, gender or race is considered marginal, of being able to construct and manifest an identity that is often off-limits or forbidden in the physical world.
* * *
The future does not announce its arrival. In Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, published in 2010, there is a scene set in the near future that involves a business meeting between a young woman and an older man. After talking for a while, the girl becomes agitated by the demands of speech and asks the man if she can “T” (text) him instead, though they are sitting side by side. As information silently flushes between their two handsets, she looks “almost sleepy with relief”, describing the exchange as pure. Reading it, I can distinctly remember thinking that it was appalling, shocking, wonderfully far-fetched. Within a matter of months it seemed instead merely plausible, a little gauche, but entirely understandable as an urge. Now it is just what we do: texting in company, emailing colleagues at the same desk, avoiding encounters, DMing instead.
While I was in New York, I met with Trecartin to discuss Surround Audience and what it has to say about the future we have fallen into. He was clutching a coffee and dressed in a red hoodie emblazoned with the word HUNT, a leftover prop from a shoot. He spoke much more slowly than the logorrheic characters he plays in films, pausing frequently to locate the exact word. He, too, felt that, with the acceleration in the past few years, we have entered almost unknowingly into a new era, long heralded and abruptly arrived. “We don’t necessarily look different yet, but we’re very different,” he said.
This space, the future now, is characterised, he believes, by a blurring between individuals and networks. “Your existence is shared and maintained and you don’t have control over all of it.”
But Trecartin feels broadly positive about where our embrace of technology might take us. “It’s obvious,” he said, “that none of this stuff can be controlled, so all we can do is steer and help encourage compassionate usage and hope things accumulate in ways that are good for people and not awful … Maybe I’m being naive about this, but all of these things feel natural. It’s like the way we already work. We’re making things that are already in us.”
The key word here is compassion, but I was also struck by his use of the word natural. Critiques of the technological society often seem possessed by a fear that what is happening is profoundly unnatural, that we are becoming post-human, entering what Turkle has called “the robotic moment”. But Surround Audience felt deeply human; an intensely life-affirming combination of curiosity, hopefulness and fear, full of richly creative strategies for engagement and subversion.
Over the week, I kept being drawn back by one piece in particular, an untitled six-minute film by the Austrian artist Oliver Laric, whose work is often about the tension between copies and originals. Laric has redrawn and animated scenes of physical transformation from dozens of cartoons, anchored by an odd, unsettlingly melancholy loop of music. Nothing stays constant. Forms continually migrate, a panther turning into a beautiful girl, Pinocchio into a donkey, an old woman deliquescing into mud. The people’s expressions are striking, as their bodies melt and reform, a heartrending mixture of alarm and resignation. The film captures our anxieties about image: Am I desirable? Do I need to be tweaked or improved? This sense of being out of control, subject to external and sinister forces, is part of what it has always meant to be human, to be trapped in temporal existence, with the inevitable upheavals and losses that entails. What could be more sci-fi, after all, than the everyday horror show of ageing, sickness, death?
Somehow, the vulnerability expressed by Laric’s film gave me a sense of hope. Talking to Trecartin, who is only three years younger than me, had felt like encountering someone from a different generation. My own understanding of loneliness relied on a belief in solid, separate selves that he saw as hopelessly outmoded. In his worldview, everyone was perpetually slipping into each other, passing through ceaseless cycles of transformation; no longer separate, but interspersed. Perhaps he was right. We aren’t as solid as we once thought. We are embodied but we are also networks, living on inside machines and in other people’s heads; memories and data streams. We are being watched and we do not have control. We long for contact and it makes us afraid. But as long as we are still capable of feeling and expressing vulnerability, intimacy stands a chance.
Monday, 14 January 2013
Is this the loneliest generation?
The Government is trying to quantify social isolation amid health fears
Sunday, 13 January 2013
Government officials have been ordered to find out exactly how lonely Britain's population is, amid concerns that "the most isolated generation ever" will overwhelm the NHS.
The Department of Health is attempting to measure the extent of "social
isolation" in the UK, after warnings that it has sparked spiralling levels of
illnesses including heart disease, high blood pressure, dementia and
depression.
Research has revealed that loneliness is a growing problem in the UK – particularly among the elderly – with one in three admitting that they sometimes feel lonely. Among older people, more than half live alone, 17 per cent are in contact with family, friends and neighbours less than once a week, and almost five million say the television is their main form of company.
However, the trend is expected to worsen in the coming years. The Office for National Statistics disclosed last year that the number of Britons living alone has risen to a record 7.6 million – one million more than in 1996 and amounting to almost one in three households.
But beyond the personal problems the "loneliness epidemic" presents, ministers have been put on alert over its wider impact – and financial costs. Loneliness is blamed for piling more pressure on to health and social care services, because it can increase the risk of complaints including heart disease and blood clots. Experts also believe it encourages people to exercise less and drink more – and ultimately go to hospital more often and move into residential care at an earlier stage.
The Government's attempts to measure social isolation among people using health and social care will increase the pressure on the NHS and councils to tackle the problem now – to slash millions from their spending on the effects of loneliness in the future.
The care and support minister, Norman Lamb, said: "For the first time, we will be aiming to define the extent of the problem by introducing a national measure for loneliness. We will be encouraging local authorities, NHS organisations and others to get better at measuring the issue in their communities. Once they have this information, they can then come up with the right solutions to address loneliness and isolation."
It is the latest in a number of attempts to gauge, and change, the national mood: Tony Blair appointed the LSE academic Lord Layard as his "happiness tsar", while David Cameron has previously tried to measure people's well-being. In each case, the driving aim was to cut health and social welfare costs by making people feel better about their lot.
An official guide on combating isolation, issued to local authorities by the organisation Campaign to End Loneliness, says: "Tackling loneliness will reduce the demand for costly health care and, by reconnecting individuals to their communities, it will give renewed access to older people's economic and social capital." The guide points out that a scheme in Essex where lonely people were "befriended" by volunteers cost £80 per person but produced annual savings of £300 per person. Another project directing older people to local services cost £480 but realised savings of £900 per person.
Anne Hayden, a Dorset GP, saved more than £80,000 in costs for six patients who were "high users of NHS services" with a befriending scheme to boost their emotional well-being. David McCullough, chief executive of the WRVS (formerly the Women's Royal Voluntary Service), said: "It's to the benefit of not only the patient, but also the NHS as a whole, that GPs spot the early warning signs of isolation and refer patients to services such as befriending or community centres."
Case study
Win Noble was a nurse who had to give up work to care for her husband after he had a stroke and heart attack.
"It's not until you're on your own that you feel miserable. My husband died in 2001. I had nursed him for 20 years.
"In 2005, my next-to-oldest daughter died and then so did my youngest daughter. I was on my own because the rest of the family don't live in the area and I'm partially disabled, so I can't really socialise. One of my other daughters is housebound, one lives in Rhyl and one in Skegness and my only son is in Sleaford. I hadn't seen my son for five years but he rings me and came down this week.
"I don't see the others. I used to read a lot of books, from the mobile library, and I do a lot of puzzles just to keep occupied.
"Age Concern contacted me and suggested a craft class. After a few weeks they started to get a group together to play games like Scrabble and have quizzes. I got really involved and really enjoyed it. I became a volunteer and people needed me again."
Rachael Bentham
Research has revealed that loneliness is a growing problem in the UK – particularly among the elderly – with one in three admitting that they sometimes feel lonely. Among older people, more than half live alone, 17 per cent are in contact with family, friends and neighbours less than once a week, and almost five million say the television is their main form of company.
However, the trend is expected to worsen in the coming years. The Office for National Statistics disclosed last year that the number of Britons living alone has risen to a record 7.6 million – one million more than in 1996 and amounting to almost one in three households.
But beyond the personal problems the "loneliness epidemic" presents, ministers have been put on alert over its wider impact – and financial costs. Loneliness is blamed for piling more pressure on to health and social care services, because it can increase the risk of complaints including heart disease and blood clots. Experts also believe it encourages people to exercise less and drink more – and ultimately go to hospital more often and move into residential care at an earlier stage.
The Government's attempts to measure social isolation among people using health and social care will increase the pressure on the NHS and councils to tackle the problem now – to slash millions from their spending on the effects of loneliness in the future.
The care and support minister, Norman Lamb, said: "For the first time, we will be aiming to define the extent of the problem by introducing a national measure for loneliness. We will be encouraging local authorities, NHS organisations and others to get better at measuring the issue in their communities. Once they have this information, they can then come up with the right solutions to address loneliness and isolation."
It is the latest in a number of attempts to gauge, and change, the national mood: Tony Blair appointed the LSE academic Lord Layard as his "happiness tsar", while David Cameron has previously tried to measure people's well-being. In each case, the driving aim was to cut health and social welfare costs by making people feel better about their lot.
An official guide on combating isolation, issued to local authorities by the organisation Campaign to End Loneliness, says: "Tackling loneliness will reduce the demand for costly health care and, by reconnecting individuals to their communities, it will give renewed access to older people's economic and social capital." The guide points out that a scheme in Essex where lonely people were "befriended" by volunteers cost £80 per person but produced annual savings of £300 per person. Another project directing older people to local services cost £480 but realised savings of £900 per person.
Anne Hayden, a Dorset GP, saved more than £80,000 in costs for six patients who were "high users of NHS services" with a befriending scheme to boost their emotional well-being. David McCullough, chief executive of the WRVS (formerly the Women's Royal Voluntary Service), said: "It's to the benefit of not only the patient, but also the NHS as a whole, that GPs spot the early warning signs of isolation and refer patients to services such as befriending or community centres."
Case study
Win Noble was a nurse who had to give up work to care for her husband after he had a stroke and heart attack.
"It's not until you're on your own that you feel miserable. My husband died in 2001. I had nursed him for 20 years.
"In 2005, my next-to-oldest daughter died and then so did my youngest daughter. I was on my own because the rest of the family don't live in the area and I'm partially disabled, so I can't really socialise. One of my other daughters is housebound, one lives in Rhyl and one in Skegness and my only son is in Sleaford. I hadn't seen my son for five years but he rings me and came down this week.
"I don't see the others. I used to read a lot of books, from the mobile library, and I do a lot of puzzles just to keep occupied.
"Age Concern contacted me and suggested a craft class. After a few weeks they started to get a group together to play games like Scrabble and have quizzes. I got really involved and really enjoyed it. I became a volunteer and people needed me again."
Rachael Bentham
Friday, 11 January 2013
For Indian women in America, a sea of broken dreams
By Narayan Lakshman in the Hindu
When Pavitra’s Delta Air Lines flight flew into Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on a crisp blue July morning back in 2008, her heart pounded with excitement. Though it was a dangerous time economically and few companies were hiring, her husband landed a good job with a major IT firm and was assigned to projects across the U.S.
Pavitra, who had a bachelor’s degree from India and some work experience, had made a careful plan to embark on a course of higher studies — permitted under her current H-4 visa — and then seek employment. It was all coming together for her, it seemed. But she was in for a rude shock.
Within months of her settling down in a strange new land, she found out that not only were higher studies a financially draining option, given the lack of funding for spouses of H1-B visa-holders, she was also unable to pursue a graduate programme because with her three-year Indian undergraduate degree she was not considered eligible for graduate enrolment in the U.S.
With a paucity of viable alternatives, she turned her attention to the job market, an effort that proved even more futile. “I tried applying for a job but as soon as the recruiters came to know of my H-4 visa status, they would say they do not sponsor H1-B,” Pavitra said.
Matters then took a turn for the worse. Trapped in a labyrinth of visa-related restrictions, she began to feel she had no purpose in life. “I started going through depression, loss of enthusiasm and self-esteem. I started having chronic migraines every day,” she said. As migraine attacks went, hers were so severe that she could not even open her eyes, often threw up, and had chills.
“I had to call my husband every day at work, saying I am ill and he used to come home running. Life for him was very difficult, juggling between work commitments and my doctor visits,” she said. He was unable to look for better work opportunities since he was worried and wanted to look after her.
Now in the midst of a mind-numbing routine of hobbies, she asks herself: “Where am I in my life today? Still a dependent, still need to start my career fresh at this age.” And her future looks cloudy too, as it is a shaky prospect to start and raise a family on a single income, and whenever she tries to get back in the job market, “getting back my self-confidence, independence, self-esteem... [is] going to be a struggle for me.”
If Pavitra’s situation were an idiosyncratic case of misery in the wilderness of American suburbia, it may not be a collective concern. Yet that is not the case and, to be specific, 1,00,000 to 1,50,000 people, mostly women, from India, other parts of Asia and the rest of the world are stuck in this deadening reality of joblessness and social isolation, rapid erosion of self-esteem, and attendant toxic malfunctions in their personal lives.
Let’s step back and consider the facts and numbers in question.
The issue of H-4’s debilitating impact on its holders is not a new one. In fact, writing on cases of abuse of H-4 women by their H1-B husbands in The Hindu in 2008, Shivali Shah, a New York-based lawyer, explained that the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service does not provide H-4 spouses with work authorisation until well into the green card process.
There is no prospect of working on the H-4 visa per se. The State Department’s guidance on a range of non-immigrant visas notes: “A person who has received a visa as the spouse or child of a temporary worker may not accept employment in the U.S. with the exception of spouses of L-1 visa-holders.”
“Therefore, these women are financially dependent on their husbands for anywhere from two to nine years,” Ms. Shah pointed out, adding “H-4 women are middle-class and have status in the U.S., but immigration laws can make them indigent and undocumented at the whims of their husbands.”
So how many individuals are affected by this law? Since around 2004, the USCIS has set the annual cap for H1 visas issued at approximately 65,000. Even if one were to conservatively assume that 50 per cent of these visa-holders were married, it suggests close to 32,500 spouses or partners on H-4 visas a year.
Given that the H-4 visa is often of six-year validity, it would not be far off the mark to assume that there are well over 1,00,000 individuals stuck with this visa, possibly over 1,50,000. Further, the most recent USCIS data quoted in a study by the Brookings Institution suggest that 58 per cent of the H-1B visas are granted to Indians. This means that well over 50,000 Indians are in this position.
This includes only H-1 spouses. There is a host of other visa-types, for example, I-visas for journalists, all of which are subject to the USCIS work ban for their spouses — except L-1s, usually issued for senior executives who are on intra-company transfers from other nations. If the spouses of visa-holders in these categories were also counted, the number of frustrated, but often talented, individuals unable to work would perhaps grow exponentially.
To truly come to grips with the intensity of the problem faced by individuals trapped in the H-4 visa quagmire, a glimpse into the corrosive nature of the visa’s work restrictions is useful.
Rashi Bhatnagar, a H-4 visa-holder in the U.S. who was willing to have her real name used in this story — all others have been changed to respect privacy concerns — set up a Facebook group called ‘H-4 visa, a curse,’ after facing the deadening reality of joblessness, having enjoyed years of a successful career in India. Though she had a master’s degree from India, she had numerous doors of opportunity slammed on her in the U.S. after she had to relocate to this country to join her IT-worker husband.
However, Rashi counts herself among the fortunate few, whose spouses have a senior role, some leverage with their employer and hence some hope for flexibility, such as an early or expedited green card application. For most other “H-4s,” the mathematics of the waiting time for the right to work is debilitating, killing off their most productive work years from their late twenties to late thirties.
In the EB2 category of temporary, non-immigrant workers, a H-4 visa spouse would typically wait for six years before a green card application is made and then potentially another six years for the issuance of the green card. This makes a total of around 12 years, time spent languishing in the aisles of Walmart, making small-talk with vendors on street corners, engaged in the soul-destroying household chores and the limited joys of child-rearing.
In the EB3 category, the six-year wait for the green card process initiation is compounded by an even longer eight-12 year wait for the green card itself, requiring the H-4 visa-holders to hold their life in suspended animation for a staggering 14-18 years. Over the passage of such a length of time, all hope of resuscitating one’s passion to pursue a meaningful career is likely to be extinguished, with only a sense of lonely desperation left in its wake.
Part 2
Part 2
To better understand the impact of the U.S.’ H-4 visa, the non-working visa given to the spouse of a work-authorised H-1B visa holder, The Hindu conducted a limited survey via a Facebook page that is a portal for H-4 visa holders. Along with the administrator of that page, Rashi Bhatnagar, who is herself on an H-4 visa, respondents were asked about the circumstances they found themselves in after they arrived in the U.S.
The responses not only hinted at a wide range of personal and health setbacks for female Indian H-4 visa holders but also testified to this visa’s impact on those from other nations, grown children of H-4 visa holders and, in some rare cases, male H-4 visa holders.
Take the case of Kathy, who used to be Senior Principal at a firm in the United Kingdom. After she and her children moved to the U.S. to join her husband, they had to put their oldest daughter through college with absolutely no access to financial aid because they were not permanent citizens of the U.S.
To make matters worse, when her daughter finished college she found herself, like her mother, stuck at home and unable to earn a living using the skills acquired at university. “She sits in her room all day, on her own,” Kathy worried, adding that her daughter had few friends and got very depressed.
Kathy herself fared poorly and it took a drastic toll on her health. Initially she and her daughters had private health insurance, but after she was diagnosed with a pineocytoma, or non-malignant brain tumour, she was dropped from her insurance. Apart from the compelling case that such instances make for reform of the H-4 visa restrictions, they underscore the need for the sort of health insurance reform that President Barack Obama has pushed through. As for Kathy, she and her daughter have no health insurance, no prospect of working and face a daily routine of social isolation and despondence.
Another striking case that the survey revealed was of Rahul, a male H-4 visa holder who followed his IT-professional wife to the U.S. For him, too, the stark reality of U.S. employers’ unwillingness to sponsor an H-1B struck home after many months of a frustrating job search. Cut off from friends and family and no longer the sociable, buoyant person he used to be, Rahul turned to alcohol — at a heavy cost. Caught in a downward spiral of depression, he attempted suicide several times. “I hurt myself very badly during one of these attempts and had to be hospitalised after calling 911,” he said. However, he showed resilience and tried to bounce back from that low point. He returned to India to change his field from sales and marketing and gain a greater IT focus. He even found work in a U.S. firm’s India office in the hope that the firm would apply for a work visa for him.
“Unfortunately the recession hit in 2008 and the company did not do well,” said Rahul. He had to resign himself to the prospect of staying on in India and battling the spectre of alcoholism that had arisen once again, not to mention thoughts of depression and suicide. Meanwhile, his wife and three-year-old child live out their lives in the U.S. without him.
Among most respondents to the Facebook survey, health issues arising from depression and a sense of hopelessness appeared to be common. One respondent, Joyita, said she was constantly visiting neurologists and physical therapists for treatments related to psychological turmoil “which have their roots in H-4 visa’s work restrictions”.
Even where physical symptoms were absent a sense of utter despair replaced the initial optimism that these spouses of H-1B workers had felt. Shauravi, for example, felt that she could not afford an MBA or other professional degree given the lack of funding opportunities. But the alternative, to “be at home for whole day without working and be very dependent to my husband ... has made me very weak just thinking about it”.
Another respondent, Ketaki, worried that the only degree she could afford was of no interest to her and lack of friends and complete dependence on her husband in a new environment had made her lose her self-confidence. Similarly Lavanya, who left a senior post in the Indian government, found herself struggling to keep up her self-esteem when she could not find any job, not even one that required far lower skill levels than those she possessed.
For several survey respondents their vulnerability had led to abuse within the marriage, in some cases resulting in complete familial breakdown. Priya told The Hindu that after suffering numerous beatings by her husband, she managed to file a police complaint and had him arrested. However, because as an H-4 spouse she had no access to bank accounts and other paperwork — all of which were controlled by her husband — she was unable to afford an attorney to fight the case. She was left praying for a denial of visa renewal for her husband for she had no other means to reach out to her family back in India.
A similar case was Poorvi who, despite overcoming financial hurdles and completing a U.S. academic degree, faced marital trouble, loneliness and spousal abuse that ultimately led to divorce.
The severity of personal problems faced by individuals in this position begs the question of why the spouses of H-1B, I, and a range of other visa holders have been denied the right to work, while L-1 visa holders’ spouses were granted the right some time ago,
Sheela Murthy, an expert on immigration law, told The Hindu that there had occasionally been talk in official circles about granting H-4 visa holders the right to work, but “that was before the economy tanked”. Apart from the sheer political pressure that any government would face if it tries to push through such a reform, it could also lead to some uncomfortable questions as to why the spouses of other visa holders — including the A, B, C, D, G, and F visas — could not similarly be given the right to work .
The H-4 case may be a “strong but not a winning argument”, said Ms. Murthy, noting that another fact pertinent to this case was that India ranks among the top 10 nationalities of illegal immigrants in the U.S.
On lobbying the White House and Capitol Hill for relaxing the work restrictions, she said: “I do not think we have been able to make the case clearly and strongly, with statistics and numbers, and have a very limited and strong message, to take up the drumbeat that gets both Houses of Congress on board.” There was still something missing in the strategy and articulation, she suggested.
In the end there is a complex argument to be made that must consider all of the difficult questions relating to the politics of post-recession unemployment, the plight of spouses of other visa holders, and the broader context of comprehensive immigration reform and illegal immigration.
Yet even as the weight of these unanswered questions stalls progress on H-4 visa reform, thousands of individuals in this category will continue to live with their broken dreams.
(Concluded)
Monday, 16 April 2012
Compelling case for Iraq war crime tribunal
The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times by Mohamed ElBaradei
Reviewed by Kaveh L Afrasiabi
This book, eloquently written by a former director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is a must read, both for the wealth of information it provides on the contentious issues of global nuclear diplomacy as well as for the passionate and compelling case that it presents for a war crime tribunal to
In blunt yet sincere language steeped in international law, ElBaradei writes that in light of the US's complete "disdain for international norms" in its invasion of Iraq, the United Nations should request an opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as to the legality of the Iraq war.
Convinced
that the overwhelming weight of evidence favors a
negative verdict if the ICJ ever braved such an
initiative, ElBaradei then makes a case for the
International Criminal Tribunal to "investigate
whether this constitutes a war crime". (pg 87)
Irrespective, ElBaradei is so morally outraged by the blatant pulverization of a sovereign Middle East country by a Western superpower and its allies that he also advises the Iraqis to demand war reparations - that is sure to amount to tens of billions of dollars.
If for nothing else, this book's value - in putting self-righteous Western powers on the defensive and depicting them as essentially rogue states that have caused a new global anarchy by their willful exercise of power without much regard for the rights of others - is indispensable.
Divided into 12 chapters with a useful conclusion on the future of nuclear diplomacy, the book covers nearly three decades of the author's involvement with various cases, ie, Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Iran, the notorious "nuclear bazaar of Abdul Qadeer Khan" in Pakistan, as well as nuclear asymmetry and the hypocrisy and double standard, not to mention outright deceptions, marking the behavior of US and other Western countries (along the familiar North-South divide).
In the chapters on Iraq, ElBaradei defends the cherished record of his agency in refusing to act as a sounding board for post 9/11 warmongering US policies, which earned him the occasional venom of US media that questioned his integrity. In fact, ElBaradei is equally critical of the compliant Western media that often act as indirect apparatuses of state despite their wild claims of neutrality and objectivity.
Although much of what ElBaradei writes about the US-British deceptions to go to war in Iraq is already well-known, it is instructive to revisit those "grotesque distortions" - as he puts it - from a reputable source who for years was caught in the maelstrom of contesting politics of non-proliferation.
With respect to the British role under premier Tony Blair, whom he accuses of a false alarm on Iraq's chemical weapon capability, ElBaradei actually underestimates the degree to which London influenced Washington on Iraq, characterizing this instead as a "one-way street" with the British "acting as apologists for US". (pg 67).
But, ElBaradei is not a foreign policy expert and his shortcoming, in detecting the American foreign policy elite's vulnerability with respect to British political influence, is forgivable. This is a minor defect in a solid contribution that sheds much light on how the US manipulated the UN atomic agency as "bit players" in its scheme to invade Iraq.
It shows the Pandora's box opened by the IAEA when it agreed to receive foreign intelligence from member states spying on others, thus opening the door to calibrated disinformation often beyond the ability of the agency and its meager resources to authenticate.
As a result, today the IAEA has turned into a de facto ''nuclear detective agency" that constantly receives tips from Western clients targeting specific countries. Sooner or later, either this unhealthy situation is rectified or we must expect more gaping holes in the agency's credibility.
With respect to North Korea, which has exited the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and proliferated nuclear weapons without much international backlash, ElBaradei blames the US's failure to live up to its agreed commitment and the fallacy of "attempts to contain proliferation ambitions through confrontation, sanctions, and isolation". (Pg 109)
He also writes about Libya's voluntary disarmament in 2004, a decision that the late Muammar Gaddafi now regrets in his grave, given the likelihood that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would have thought twice about attacking Libya under the guise of "responsibility to protect", thus making a mockery of the UN, if Tripoli had retained a nuclear shield.
For sure, this issue must loom large on the mind of many developing nations that have clashing interests with the (increasingly bullying) Western powers.
ElBaradei has devoted a whole chapter to the subject of nuclear double standards that discusses, for instance, how South Korea's clear evidence of non-compliance was shoved under the rug by the US in 2004 simply because it is a US allay.
The US and other privileged nuclear-have nations have been derelict in their NPT obligations to move toward nuclear disarmament, some, like France and Britain, modernizing their arsenals, while at the same time having the audacity of taking the moral high ground against countries suspected of clandestine proliferation.
ElBaradei writes that in the Middle East, "The greatest source of frustration and anxiety was the regional asymmetry of military power symbolized by Israel's arsenal." (pg 223) And yet, Israel, which since its bombardment of Iraq's nuclear facility in 1981 has been mandated by the UN Security Council to place its nuclear facilities under the IAEA inspections, has evaded this obligation with impunity.
Regarding Iran, extensively dealt with in four chapters, ElBaradei seeks to present a balanced account that pinpoints the chronology of events, interactions and negotiations that are still ongoing as of this date, thus making the book an indispensable tool for those who follow the developments in the Iran nuclear crisis.
Since his retirement from the IAEA, ElBaradei has repeatedly gone on record to state that during his tenure at the agency he never saw any evidence that Iran was proliferating nuclear weapons.
What is more, he informs readers that after the 2007 US intelligence report that confirmed that Iran's program had been peaceful since 2003, "I received a follow-up briefing by US intelligence. They did not show the supposed evidence that had let them to confirm the existence of a past Iranian nuclear weapon program, other than to refer to the same unverified set of allegations about weaponization studies that had already been discussed with the agency." (pg 269)
He also writes, "The Americans did acknowledge - as in most previous intelligence briefings - that there was no indication that Iran had undeclared nuclear material." (pg 262) Indeed, this is important information, given that in more than a dozen reports on Iran the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed the absence of any evidence of military diversion of "declared nuclear material".
In Chapter 11, on the "squandered opportunities" with Iran, the author writes about Iran-IAEA cooperation through a workplan that resulted in the successful resolution of the "six outstanding" issues that had led to the IAEA's referral of Iran's file to the UN Security Council.
Missing in this book is any mention of that workplan's concluding paragraph that stipulated the agency's treatment of Iran's nuclear file as "routine" once those issues were resolved. That this did not, and as of today has not, happened is solely due to the US-led disinformation campaign that burdened the IAEA with new data coming from a stolen Iranian lap top, even though ElBaradei readily admits that "the problem was, no one knew if any of these was real". (pg 281).
He discretely blames his deputy, Ollie Heinnonen, now turned into a valuable US asset from his recruitment by Harvard University, of buying "into the US accusations" (pg 281), and laments the fact that on a number of occasions the US scuttled meaningful negotiation with Iran by "refusing to take yes for an answer".
Questioning the US's negotiation strategy toward Iran, in a memorable passage that rings relevant to today's context of new multilateral talks with Iran, ElBaradei writes: "It was naive to ask Iran to give up everything before the start of the talks and expect a positive response. But the problem was familiar, nothing would satisfy, short of Iran coming to the table completely undressed." (pg 313)
In a clue to the direct relevance of this book to the Iran nuclear talks this weekend in Istanbul, where the US has put its foot down by demanding Iran's suspension of its 20% uranium enrichment, ElBaradei readily admits that under the NPT, Iran has the right to possess a nuclear fuel cycle, like "roughly a dozen countries" around the world. Moreover, he reminds us of the absence of a legal basis for the US's demand, in light of the fact that "many research reactors worldwide also use 90% enriched uranium fuel for peaceful purposes, such as to produce medial radioisotopes". (pg 14)
As he puts it in the final chapter, on the quest for human security, this cannot be a selective, or rather elitist, process that benefits some while depriving others. In today's increasingly interdependent world, the idea that the threat of nuclear proliferation can be contained while the asymmetrical nuclear-have nations hold onto their prized possessions and even use them to threaten the non-nuclear nations, is simply a chimerical dream that has a decent chance of turning into a nightmare. This is the core message of ElBaradei's timely book that cannot be possibly ignored.
The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times by Mohamed ElBaradei. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2011. ISBN-10: 0805093508. Price US$27, 322 pages with index 340 pages.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. He is author of Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and Looking for rights at Harvard. His latest book is UN Management Reform: Selected Articles and Interviews on United Nations CreateSpace (November 12, 2011).
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
Germany has benefitted from the Euro and should protect it.
There is only one alternative to the euro's survival: catastrophe
Little Englanders – and blinkered Germans – need to wake up to the implications of a fractured eurozone
It is hard not to have the gravest of forebodings about the
European and British economies, and about the future of Europe itself.
Nobody would start from here – an ill-designed single currency
interacting with an insupportable burden of private debt created by
oversized, undercapitalised banks. And it's as much a problem in the US
and China as in Europe. There are only least bad ways forward: none
good. This is a crisis in contemporary capitalism as much as a crisis of
Europe's monetary regime and governance. It needs to be seen in those
terms.
But so saturated is British commentary in jingoistic Euro-scepticism that Europe's travails are portrayed as proof positive that it is European visionary delusions rather than contemporary capitalism that is at fault. Greece, and indeed Ireland and even Italy, are urged to get out of the euro, for the euro to be smashed and for the entire EU project to be abandoned. This is the route to prosperity and wellbeing – with no trace of self knowledge as British trade performance deteriorates even after a monumental devaluation while our economy is still years away from recovering to 2008 levels of peak output. That is Europe's fault, or so runs the line – not the fault of our dysfunctional economic structures and policies.
However, Britain's interest is unambiguous: it lies in the survival of the euro. There is too much easy talk about countries leaving. Last week, financial policy committee member Robert Jenkins spelled out the consequences for Britain and for Europe of Greece now quitting the euro. There would be seismic bank runs in Ireland, Portugal, Spain and even Italy as citizens and companies, fearing the same could happen to them, moved their cash out of their countries. Weaker banks, tottering from losses in Greece, would fold. The European Central Bank would be overwhelmed. The European economy would slump – and Britain with it.
Greece's fight is our own. But what is being asked of Greece's new interim prime minister, Lucas Papademos, is impossible. Unemployment is 18.4%. The schedule of its foreign loan repayments over the next five years beggars belief. On the other hand, Greek capitalism, a network of family oligarchs rigging Greek markets and leading a society in which tax evasion is morally and socially acceptable, is in acute need of reform. Europe could have been organised around floating exchange rates rather than a single currency, but the vast overhang of private debt alongside crocked banks demands similar medicine.
And while staying in the euro is in the interest of Greece – and Italy – it is in the rest of Europe's interest too. But there has to be a quid pro quo for all the pain that such severe austerity involves. Private and public debt needs to be radically lowered; and in a world of little growth there are only two routes. Either it has to be forgiven by their creditors, or there has to be inflation. If the eurozone can deliver neither, its future is in question.
In July and, again, in October, the EU signalled it understood what needed to be done and moved towards it – a combination of decisive debt forgiveness, the creation of a European Monetary Fund, substantially financed by Germany and which could bail out stricken banks and even governments, and the empowerment of the European Central Bank to go beyond supplying emergency cash on crisis terms. Instead, it could act as a lender of last resort everywhere in the eurozone.
The system could potentially be put in place fast; the right sentiments have been uttered – but after each summit Germany has consistently blocked making the money flow. It has said no to the European Central Bank operating as a lender of last resort across the eurozone; no to creating a genuine European Monetary Fund on the scale needed; no to the creation of single euro bonds. Ireland, Greece and Italy are all doing their part. Germany must now do its – or the euro will buckle.
Germany's phobias are well-known – inflation and then slump led to Hitler. What's more, the German constitutional court has ruled that the EU is a Staatenbund (a group of states). This means that Germany can only constitutionally make fiscal transfers to other members if each one is agreed by the German parliament. But phobias and constitutional courts cannot trump the agonising choice facing Germany and Europe.
Germany profits richly from the way the eurozone is organised. It is the only country in Europe whose share of world trade has risen over the past 10 years. But it enjoys the same exchange rate as much weaker exporters such as Greece or Spain – a huge boon. Even Britain, with our much vaunted floating exchange rate, has seen our share of world trade fall by a third over the same period.
Germany now has to accept its part of the bargain. The choice must be confronted. One option to secure the euro's future is via widespread debt forgiveness and fiscal transfers backed by Germany; the only other route out is inflation.
Here I make a modest proposal. Instead of delivering purposeless lectures from the sidelines about the need for action while he prepares to blame Europe for the ongoing British stagnation, for which he is primarily responsible, David Cameron should make the intervention of his life. He should travel to Germany and make a speech in German – however embarrassing – spelling out the choices. If Germany is unprepared to accept them, he should argue that the least bad option is not for Greece to leave the euro – but for Germany, whose economy is strong enough to take the shock, to do so.
He should say that while it was right for Britain not to join the single currency as it was previously constructed, if Germany were to act responsibly, Britain would peg sterling to a reformed euro and in the long run even consider joining the regime. Moreover, Britain would do this either way, he could argue – eventually joining a single currency in which Germany accepted its responsibilities or a single currency without Germany.
Such a speech – which, of course, will never be made – would create turmoil in Germany. It fears isolation in Europe even more than it fears inflation. It prizes the undervaluation of its exports priced in euro. It would force its leadership to recognise that there are other potential ways of organising our continent other than around German preoccupations – and perhaps trigger the change in German policy that is needed. It would change the rules of the game at a stroke, and show that Britain is a European force with which to be reckoned. But Cameron is trapped into Little England isolationism. And Little Englanders, along with moralistic and blinkered Germans, threaten to sink both the idea of Europe – and its economy.
But so saturated is British commentary in jingoistic Euro-scepticism that Europe's travails are portrayed as proof positive that it is European visionary delusions rather than contemporary capitalism that is at fault. Greece, and indeed Ireland and even Italy, are urged to get out of the euro, for the euro to be smashed and for the entire EU project to be abandoned. This is the route to prosperity and wellbeing – with no trace of self knowledge as British trade performance deteriorates even after a monumental devaluation while our economy is still years away from recovering to 2008 levels of peak output. That is Europe's fault, or so runs the line – not the fault of our dysfunctional economic structures and policies.
However, Britain's interest is unambiguous: it lies in the survival of the euro. There is too much easy talk about countries leaving. Last week, financial policy committee member Robert Jenkins spelled out the consequences for Britain and for Europe of Greece now quitting the euro. There would be seismic bank runs in Ireland, Portugal, Spain and even Italy as citizens and companies, fearing the same could happen to them, moved their cash out of their countries. Weaker banks, tottering from losses in Greece, would fold. The European Central Bank would be overwhelmed. The European economy would slump – and Britain with it.
Greece's fight is our own. But what is being asked of Greece's new interim prime minister, Lucas Papademos, is impossible. Unemployment is 18.4%. The schedule of its foreign loan repayments over the next five years beggars belief. On the other hand, Greek capitalism, a network of family oligarchs rigging Greek markets and leading a society in which tax evasion is morally and socially acceptable, is in acute need of reform. Europe could have been organised around floating exchange rates rather than a single currency, but the vast overhang of private debt alongside crocked banks demands similar medicine.
And while staying in the euro is in the interest of Greece – and Italy – it is in the rest of Europe's interest too. But there has to be a quid pro quo for all the pain that such severe austerity involves. Private and public debt needs to be radically lowered; and in a world of little growth there are only two routes. Either it has to be forgiven by their creditors, or there has to be inflation. If the eurozone can deliver neither, its future is in question.
In July and, again, in October, the EU signalled it understood what needed to be done and moved towards it – a combination of decisive debt forgiveness, the creation of a European Monetary Fund, substantially financed by Germany and which could bail out stricken banks and even governments, and the empowerment of the European Central Bank to go beyond supplying emergency cash on crisis terms. Instead, it could act as a lender of last resort everywhere in the eurozone.
The system could potentially be put in place fast; the right sentiments have been uttered – but after each summit Germany has consistently blocked making the money flow. It has said no to the European Central Bank operating as a lender of last resort across the eurozone; no to creating a genuine European Monetary Fund on the scale needed; no to the creation of single euro bonds. Ireland, Greece and Italy are all doing their part. Germany must now do its – or the euro will buckle.
Germany's phobias are well-known – inflation and then slump led to Hitler. What's more, the German constitutional court has ruled that the EU is a Staatenbund (a group of states). This means that Germany can only constitutionally make fiscal transfers to other members if each one is agreed by the German parliament. But phobias and constitutional courts cannot trump the agonising choice facing Germany and Europe.
Germany profits richly from the way the eurozone is organised. It is the only country in Europe whose share of world trade has risen over the past 10 years. But it enjoys the same exchange rate as much weaker exporters such as Greece or Spain – a huge boon. Even Britain, with our much vaunted floating exchange rate, has seen our share of world trade fall by a third over the same period.
Germany now has to accept its part of the bargain. The choice must be confronted. One option to secure the euro's future is via widespread debt forgiveness and fiscal transfers backed by Germany; the only other route out is inflation.
Here I make a modest proposal. Instead of delivering purposeless lectures from the sidelines about the need for action while he prepares to blame Europe for the ongoing British stagnation, for which he is primarily responsible, David Cameron should make the intervention of his life. He should travel to Germany and make a speech in German – however embarrassing – spelling out the choices. If Germany is unprepared to accept them, he should argue that the least bad option is not for Greece to leave the euro – but for Germany, whose economy is strong enough to take the shock, to do so.
He should say that while it was right for Britain not to join the single currency as it was previously constructed, if Germany were to act responsibly, Britain would peg sterling to a reformed euro and in the long run even consider joining the regime. Moreover, Britain would do this either way, he could argue – eventually joining a single currency in which Germany accepted its responsibilities or a single currency without Germany.
Such a speech – which, of course, will never be made – would create turmoil in Germany. It fears isolation in Europe even more than it fears inflation. It prizes the undervaluation of its exports priced in euro. It would force its leadership to recognise that there are other potential ways of organising our continent other than around German preoccupations – and perhaps trigger the change in German policy that is needed. It would change the rules of the game at a stroke, and show that Britain is a European force with which to be reckoned. But Cameron is trapped into Little England isolationism. And Little Englanders, along with moralistic and blinkered Germans, threaten to sink both the idea of Europe – and its economy.
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